It started with my grandmother's hands.

My grandmother — we called her Sitti — made bread with her hands every Friday for fifty-one years. I can still hear the sound of the dough against the bench. The rhythm of it, three rooms away.

In the last year of her life she couldn't open a jar. Her knuckles had swollen into something she didn't recognise as her own. She would hold her hands up to the window sometimes and just look at them, like she was trying to remember what they used to do.

I was twenty-six and I felt completely useless.

A physiotherapist mentioned collagen — Type I and III, the kind that supports skin, hair, nails and the connective tissue that holds a person together. So I did what anyone does. I drove to the chemist and picked up the first tub on the shelf.

Bovine collagen peptides. I turned it over. Nothing about the source. Nothing about the slaughter. Nothing about whether it had been processed on the same line as porcine gelatin.

So I emailed the brand. They took eleven days to reply and told me they could not disclose supplier information. I emailed four more. Two never wrote back. One told me their collagen was suitable for most dietary requirements, which is a sentence that means nothing at all. The last one was honest with me, and the answer was no.

Sitti prayed five times a day for seventy-seven years. She was not going to spend the end of her life swallowing something she would have to seek forgiveness for. And I was not going to be the one who handed it to her.

I would love to tell you I found it quickly. I didn't.

I found plenty of collagen that said halal. A logo on a website. A certificate that had expired in 2019. A supplier who would send me a PDF but would not let me see the plant. Halal turned out to be a word a lot of people were comfortable using and very few were comfortable proving.

The answer, when it finally came, was unglamorous: a handful of family-run cattle stations in New South Wales and Southland, New Zealand. Grass-fed, open pasture, no feedlot finishing. And a processing facility where zabihah wasn't a marketing line — it was just how the floor ran, supervised, every single day, because that is who they were.

The first sample arrived in a plain foil bag with a handwritten label. I stirred it into my coffee at the kitchen bench at six in the morning and I cried, which I accept is an unhinged reaction to a beverage.

Barakah gets translated as blessing, but that's thin. Barakah is the blessing that multiplies. The small thing that goes further than it has any right to. The meal that feeds more people than it was cooked for. The one hour of sleep that carries you through the whole day.

It is what my grandmother had in her hands, and in her bread, and in the way she made every person who came through her door feel like they had been expected.

We sell one product. On purpose. One pouch, one scoop, ten grams of Type I and III peptides, and nothing else in the bag — no fillers, no sweeteners, no proprietary blend hiding behind a trademark. Certified halal at the source, and we will show you the certificate before you think to ask for it.

I can't give my grandmother her hands back. What I can do is make sure the next woman standing in that aisle with her phone out doesn't lose two years looking for an answer.

That's the whole company. That's it.